


build me up on rising tide

by kimaracretak



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Death Fix, Developing Relationship, F/F, Hopeful Ending, Memory Loss, Pre-Relationship, Recovery, telepathy sorta, trill biology (and liberties taken therewith)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-17
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-15 05:10:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11223984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: (hopes and aspirations / unclosing an enthralled door): She wakes, she thinks, to a Trill's face, worry and care and a promise to live on. Her concern is unbearable andOh, Jadzia says, or maybe she just thinks,oh, you're very pretty.Or; the one where Jadzia makes it back to Trill at the end of season 6, and nothing is easier





	build me up on rising tide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katrinahood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katrinahood/gifts).



> title from iamamiwhoami, 'blue blue', summary quote from eluveitie, 'inis mona'
> 
> for [katrinahood](http://katrinahood.tumblr.com) in the [trek rarepair swap](https://trek-rarepair-swap.tumblr.com/) (not sure if the katrinahood on ao3 is also you; drop me a line w yr ao3 name & i'll gift it to you)

In the beginning there is silence, and Dax thinks this is wrong.

Dax remembers the Before: milky darkness that hums with the click-spark of friend-thoughts vibrating against rocks and rivers.

Dax remembers the Between: tangled knots of music-thoughts, slip-sliding against their skin in an overlapping farewell greeting, some fading and others brightening.

It has never been like this before, and for the first time in their life, Dax is afraid.

 

***

 

At the end there is light, and Jadzia thinks this was always meant.

On the temple floor she fits her hand over the gash in her abdomen — _not Dax,_  she thinks somewhere beyond the pain, and smiles with delirious relief, _Dax will live beyond this body_ — and waits for the light to fade. It is not the most painful of deaths, but Jadzia still has so much left unfinished —

At the end Dax whose life was ever hers as well remembers Kahn and does not speak but says, _we know._

 

She wakes, she thinks, to Worf's face, grief and anger and promise to keep fighting.

His fury is uplifting and _Oh,_  Jadzia says, or maybe she just thinks, _oh, love, our child._

There are hands on her wrists, on her forehead, the chill warmth of the infirmary lifting her into a death that has never felt quite like this.

 

She wakes, she thinks, to a Trill's face, worry and care and a promise to live on.

Her concern is unbearable and  _Oh,_  Jadzia says, or maybe she just thinks, _oh, you're very pretty._

There are hands on her wrists, on her forehead, tracing out patterns that don't quite map to the web of spots imprinted on the back of her eyelids. Jadzia falls back to sleep in comfort: Dax will be cared for by this new host, just as Dax will care for them.

 

Jadzia falls to sleep and falls, and in the silence of the not-sleep there is always the song.

 

***

 

Ezri Tigan cannot stay away from the infirmary. The staff don't mind, if she stays out of their way, so Ezri sits statue-still by the unconscious Trill and waits — for what, she's not sure.

Jadzia Dax looks thin and fragile laid out on the biobed, far too small to hold all the lives Ezri knows the Dax symbiont has had. She soothes Jadzia's forehead with cool cloths when she writhes in the grip of nightmares that manage to pierce her medically induced coma, shares the little she remembers about symbiont biology that hasn't made its way into Starfleet databases. Still it doesn't feel like enough.

"She needs a Trill physician," Ezri tells Dr. Aranea, as the homeworld draws closer and Jadzia's sleep grows more restless.

"I know," Aranea says, and her eyes never leave Jadzia's monitors.

Ezri's skin prickles with electricity now, when she draws too close to Jadzia. She thinks of the stories she's heard, of symbionts and telepathy and memory transference that had never seemed to matter on New Sydney where the rocks held everyone's stories without judgment or control, and shivers uncontrollably.

She puts in a request for a leave of absence, to accompany Jadzia planetside. Host and symbiont both rarely survive something like this, she reasons. It's an opportunity, it's a necessity, it's —

— easier this, than to explain the songs dimly almost-heard.

Captain Raymer rests her hand on Ezri's shoulder and does not say a word, but the request is approved by the time they enter orbit. 

 

***

 

Ezri finds them an apartment in Leran Manev after the Symbiosis Commission's doctors release Jadzia from their care, marks it down as a Starfleet expense. It's summer in the capitol, hazy-bright and untouched by war, and the weight in the eyes of each member of the Commission as they charged her to care for Jadzia Dax makes it very easy for Ezri to ignore the nagging thought that she needed to return to the _Destiny._

She was a good counselor, a necessary one, but the crew had each other. Jadzia had — Jadzia had —

— the suffocating distance of the Commission, and Ezri had decided against joining but she knows deep her her blood where a symbiont could talk to her if it chose that that is not enough.

Jadzia sleeps for two more days, while Ezri sprawls on the studio apartment's couch and reads everything she can about every Dax host. She goes through articles and vids with a desperate focus, like she's back at the Academy cramming for final exams, yet there's something different this time.

When she tumbles off the couch with an unthinking grace, headed for the kitchen to prep another hypospray of Jadzia's medicine, she realises with a chill that settles over her just like the unfamiliar electricity of Jadzia's coma on the _Destiny_ , that she's no longer sure where in her mind Dax's stories end and Dax's memories begin.

So it isn't, really, that much of a surprise when Jadzia wakes up not quite right.

 

***

 

Jadzia wakes in a real bed.

An _unfamiliar_  real bed.

Jadzia wakes in an unfamiliar bed and Dax feels very far away.

"Hey," a soft voice says from somewhere nearby. Jadzia turns her head with difficulty and sees the woman from her dreams.

Memories?

Those, too, feel very far away.

"The doctors told me you would probably wake up today," she continues. "You and Dax were in bad shape for a really long time. How are you feeling?"

Jadzia furrows her brow. _Better_ , she wants to say, but everything must feel better than Curzon, tired and aching and unable to do anything but watch his body deteriorate. But Jadzia had been on a temple floor. Was this better?

 _It's not linear,_ she thinks, and then she laughs, because Ben had said the same thing. Where was Ben?

"Lost," she says, almost before she realises it's true, and then she wishes she hadn't said anything at all when the other woman's face crumples.

Sleep. If she closes her eyes to sleep, she doesn't have to see her pain.

 

***

 

There are gaps in Jadzia's memories now, small cauterised holes run through past lives where moments, feelings are simply gone.

The heaviness is loss, she knows this now and is grateful: without it, she thinks, she would float away in search of all the missing pieces.

Ezri flits around the tiny apartment, small and sharp like she's on a mission to cut away all the bad things in their lives and build something new from all the rest. It's a beautiful dedication, beautiful like everything else about Ezri, and it reminds Jadzia of — reminds Jadzia of —

— something that isn't a part of her anymore, and deep within her blood where Dax still lives they do not speak but they say, _I am sorry._

_It was necessary._

The music is two songs now, and they are both Dax.

Ezri suggests the Guardians, one morning over raktajino when their fingers are laced together and they share stories in hopes of putting the pieces of Jadzia-Ezri-Dax into a new whole.

Dax stirs, and offers no opinion. Jadzia thinks of secrets kept and wielded as a weapon and shudders. She is not at all sure she wants to cede Dax, to cede Ezri to them, to see with what they would patch the holes of her former lives. To see what they would rip from Ezri, how they would punish Dax.

"No," she says thoughtfully. "Not yet, I don't think. I still remember Audrid, and I don't think —"

Ezri falls silent, turns inward, and Jadzia can see her reaching for Dax's memories of their time on the Commission as Audrid, as Curzon. "Oh," she says very quietly. "Oh, I see."

There are protesters outside the Symbiosis Commission, outside the Senate Tower. Starfleet and the Dominion seem even further away than the whole of Jadzia Dax, before her half-death.

 

***

 

They move closer to the ocean, where the rivers that flow through the caves of Mak'ala finally reach the sea. Dax guides them, as if the salt of the sea is tugging on something in the foundation of their blood-memories. On the beach, Ezri rests her head on Jadzia's shoulder and wonders how far they will rise together.

"Do you think you count as dead?" she asks. "For re-association, I mean. Do I count as a host?"

"I don't know," Jadzia says, the skin around her eyes pulled tight in thought. "I'm not sure what either of us are, anymore. But I think we have time."

"Not that much," Ezri says. Her skin, her _mind_ still itches, memories settling uneasy and history left unsatisfied.

Jadzia kisses her cheek. "Enough time," she says. "The Caves are waiting. We'll figure this out, all of it."

The lilac sea in front of them is endless like the song, and only beginning.


End file.
